Morgan Stanley's head of fixed-income research in Tokyo is leaving the firm to start his own hedge fund.
Hidetoshi Ohashi plans to leave at the end of June after almost a dozen years at the firm, according to Bloomberg. He will start his hedge fund in Singaport and focus on Japanese corporate bonds and credit-default swaps.
Ohashi is not the first nor will he be the last to leave an investment bank for a hedge fund over the next couple of years.
Vernon Barback, president and COO of GlobeOp, a hedge fund administrator with $187 billion in assets, says more than half of his 30 new-fund clients in 2011 were startups coming out of investment banks.
Ohashi's departure to the hedge fund world isn't a first for Morgan Stanley. Peter Muller’s enigmatic Process Driven Trading group, or PDT, is planning to spin out from Morgan later this year. Since its beginning in 1993 the team had an estimated annual average return of more than 20%. Morgan Stanley has the option to acquire a preferred stake in the new entity, dubbed PDT Advisors.